Hasnain says:

This was a sobering read - not because of the content itself, but the implications that come from really thinking about what it's saying.

"Perfectionism endures because it has its merits, and we must see these clearly as well. It establishes a high standard and feeds on a source of intense energy, i.e. the fear of losing our identity and self-worth. So it is no surprise that some of the world's luminaries have made contracts with it.

But the cost of that contract is just as present. Carl Gauss, through whom it set mathematics back by decades:

> His own contemporaries begged him to relax his frigid perfection so that mathematics might advance more rapidly, but Gauss never relaxed. [...] Had he divulged what he knew it is quite possible that mathematics would now be half a century or more ahead of where it is.

— E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics"

Hasnain says:

“But responsibility for North Korea's ongoing internet outages doesn't lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks—and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.”

Hasnain says:

“When I was a boy, my dad told me that math is like a tower. One thing builds on the next. Addition builds on numbers. Subtraction builds on addition. And on it goes, ascending through algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus, all the way up to “higher math” — an appropriate name for a soaring edifice.

But once I learned about infinite series, I could no longer see math as a tower. Nor is it a tree, as another metaphor would have it. Its different parts are not branches that split off and go their separate ways. No — math is a web. All its parts connect to and support each other. No part of math is split off from the rest. It’s a network, a bit like a nervous system — or, better yet, a brain.”

Hasnain says:

ML can cause harm if left unchecked, case study #1000. Though humans are culpable here too - especially for the tone deaf responses and removals of negative reviews pointing out the harm.

“Since then, suicides linked to sales of the preservative through Amazon have continued. The New York Times identified 10 people who had killed themselves using the chemical compound after buying it through the site in the past two years, including a 16-year-old girl in Ohio, a pair of college freshmen in Pennsylvania and Missouri, and a 27-year-old in Texas whose mother has filed a wrongful-death suit against Amazon. Enough people purchased the preservative to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts.”

Hasnain says:

Great read covering supply chains, economic factors, politics, and, as always - the importance of heeding warnings and putting in preventative work.

“As the country’s most cynical economists and credulous news anchors would tell it, the breaking of the ports was the natural result of lavishing stimulus checks upon lower-income Americans, who nearly ruined Christmas with their indomitable desire for foldable furniture and Tickle Me Elmo. In reality, it’s the combination of some of the worst sins in economic policy: privatization, deregulation, cartelization, with some parasitic private equity sprinkled in too, all of which sacrificed resiliency, long-term planning, and even the country’s aptitude for economic growth in favor of corporate profits.”

Hasnain says:

Headline really doesn’t seem to match the article contents but this is a good read.

“Four-day workweeks are having a moment, thanks to widely publicized trials launched in several countries in the past few months, alongside companies marking the switch with splashy announcements. WIRED spoke to 15 workers at six tech companies that have adopted a shortened week. Employees generally approved; some saw it as a mixed blessing, while others considered it “a godsend.” This is despite the fact that the precise interpretation of “four-day workweek” seems to vary; some companies stick to 40 hours; many use a 32-hour week, but all insist that the same amount of work—at a minimum—must get done.”

Hasnain says:

Great read that mixes a human interest story (a conservative trump voting republican changing their views after taking this class) with educational material from a class. I definitely learnt stuff from this and now I have some readings to look up!

“The goal of the class is not to change minds, but to introduce students to critical race theory and how to apply it to the law, current events and issues in popular discourse, Murphree said. To that end, the class has talked about racism and how to define it, the idea of color-blindness, and the difference between equity and equality. They also learned about “interest convergence,” a core tenet of critical race theory that argues communities of color only achieve progress when white communities also benefit. Interest convergence, Jones said, helped her better understand why the Mississippi Legislature voted to change the state flag in 2020 — because “they were about to lose a lot of money with the NCAA.””

Hasnain says:

This is just brazen NIMBYism at this point. If it’s a mountain lion habitat then they shouldn’t have any schools or even other homes there.

““You can build a McMansion and that somehow won’t hurt the mountain lion,” said Foote. “But if you build two units the lions will somehow fall over and die.””

Hasnain says:

Great eye opening read from a member of the google AI ethics team.

“In a word, tech has a whiteness problem. Google is not just a tech organization. Google is a white tech organization. Meta is a white tech organization. So are Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and others that are announced in the same breath when we discuss the “techlash”. But so are research centers like OpenAI who are backed by oodles of venture capital from Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, or the Allen Institute for AI, founded by Paul Allen from Microsoft. More specifically, tech organizations are committed to defending whiteness through the “interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings”, the techniques of reproducing the organization. In this case, that means defending their policies of recruitment, hierarchization, and monetization. Sociologist Amber Hamilton discusses how corporate actors, tech organizations included, rarely named the symptoms of whiteness — that is, their own racist organizational practices — in their responses to the racial reckoning of 2020, one of the largest social movements of our lifetimes.”

Hasnain says:

Great analysis of both Rust and Zig from a Julia programmer. I’m still a rust fanboy but Zig has been on my radar quite a while and I’m looking forward to exploring it.

“So when should a person use rust and when should they use zig? After all, my conclusion here is certainly NOT "everyone should use zig instead of rust". The languages have similar goals, so this will usually come down to personal preference. Obviously, if, for whatever reason, you are ultra-paranoid about memory safety issues but cannot tolerate garbage collection, then it's almost as if you are obligated to use rust. That said, of course rust cannot magically guarantee that you will always write "correct" code. It's also not as if every piece of zig, C or C++ code you write is constantly at risk of segfaulting. In my C++ days, I can't say that the kinds of memory issues that rust was designed to solve were very often a serious concern for me (though, it's worth pointing out that I was doing scientific/numerical stuff that tended not to force me to do nearly as much allocating and deallocating as a more complicated run-time might).”